Originally posted by GeneV I didn't miss that point at all. You can adapt just about anything to anything, but you won't have all the features working and you will have an adapter or two to deal with. Most K mount lenses out there do just about everything they ever did.
Not really. The K-01 K mount is still crippled, which means that K and M lenses can be used easier on other MILCs than they can be used on Pentax. Takumars work better on MILC mounts
than on K mount since they can use adapters that lock properly onto a mount. And autofocus lenses don't autofocus as fast as they did on SLRs, so the most important advantage is eroded.
But most importantly, the K-01 provided no advantage in this area that all Pentax SLRs didn't already provide, so this "benefit" that you mentioned satisfied no real market demand. But I am sure that this "benefit" is how it was justified by Pentax management. It "makes sense" if I shut down the critical thinking section of my brain.
Originally posted by GeneV You seem to hate this camera, and I am no big fan (mirrorless isn't the best for my presbyopia). I was up for it only at a cheap price.
I don't hate it - hate is irrational and instinctive and my dislike of the K-01 is very rational. I do not react to how the K-01 looks, I react as I think about its design - about what it is and what it could have been.
The K-01 just never made sense as a product. As an engineer, I just find its design painful. And this was a product that seemed to wish to exclude the best parts of Pentax engineering by outsourcing the camera body design. It tried to hide a lack of purpose behind style and it failed.
Originally posted by GeneV However, the one thing it does offer is easy, fully functional, access to a mount that has been around a long time and is widespread.
Just like any other Pentax K mount camera still in production and it's not as if people are stomping on each other to purchase them.
The only real advantage of the K-01 is that it has opened the eyes of some Pentax users to a different way of using a camera. It is nice to see people realizing that an optical viewfinder is not that necessary - it paves the way for leaving SLRs behind.